After two awkward people decide to get married, a revelation about one's past threatens to destroy their lives and make them both even more awkward. 2026's The Drama is superficially in the tradition of Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, a movie in which actors explore the psychological depths of characters through intellectual dialogue. But writer/director Kristoffer Borgli has a very clear message he wants the audience to come away with and he sticks to it over the course of the film to the detriment of the characters and the story.
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya star as Charlie and Emma. We meet them as they meet each other, in a coffee shop, where Charlie awkwardly approaches Emma to stumble over his words, praising the book she's reading, which he later admits to not having read, but she can't hear him anyway because she's deaf in one ear and the other has an earbud in it. When she realises he was talking and evidently feels attracted to him, too, she awkwardly suggests starting over, and so he goes back to his seat and musters his courage. It's a little funny but mostly it's uncomfortable.
One night over dinner with another couple, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), maid of honour and best man at Charlie and Emma's upcoming wedding, the four of them, after many glasses of wine, decide to talk about the worst thing they've ever done. After the three others make their confessions, Emma reveals that when she was fifteen she planned a mass shooting at her school. Rachel is unable to restrain expressing her extreme disgust, telling the group how her cousin was paralyzed after having been shot in a mass shooting. The rest of the movie is told primarily from Charlie's point of view as he struggles to cope with Emma's revelation.
Halfway through the movie, the thought came to me that Pattinson was endeavouring to play the most awkward man in history. He is the Woody Allen character in this movie except without Allen's cleverness or insight. The morning after the revelation, he sees a mug in their cupboard with a picture of a gun on it and immediately throws it in the trash. When Emma confronts him about the mug she saw in the trash, he denies that he threw it away despite the obvious fact that she wouldn't have brought it up if she hadn't seen it in the trash and then he explains he did it because it was broken though she could plainly see it wasn't. This becomes a pattern throughout the film--he lies badly when he doesn't have to about impulsive actions he's prompted to take by his discomfort.
Pattinson is so intensely awkward I realised I was thinking about his awkwardness much more than the issue the film was apparently aiming to tackle, which was how we deal with the increasing number of shooters in the U.S. But then I realised this was Borgli's strategy, and it became clear when Charlie had his one non-awkward, insightful moment in the film, when he confronts Rachel and Mike and says that, with so many people in the U.S. committing mass shootings, there must be an enormous number of people who think about it and don't do it. As he's saying this, Borgli presents a montage of people walking the streets, predominately attractive young women, some of them with anguished looks on their faces. The sequence concludes with a pretty blonde woman on a park bench looking like she's about to cry.
There's one scene, a flashback to Emma in school, in which one of the other students mentions that the shooters are always boys, and Emma counters that the song "I Don't Like Mondays" was based on the true story of a female mass shooter. It's clear why Emma would have thought about this but, along with that montage, I realised that Borgli was subtly trying to frame this as something girls go through despite the reality that mass shooters are 99% of the time boys. And then I considered how the opposite side of the argument was presented in the film.
Rachel had confessed to locking a child in a closet in an abandoned house when she was a teenager. This prompted the whole town to search for the boy whom she claims was eventually found. She also points out that the human brain doesn't finish maturing until the age of 25. Her reaction to Emma's confession is so strident, so indignant that she comes off as an obnoxious hypocrite. We see the cousin she refers to later in the film, briefly, at which time she's shown to be a little put off by Charlie's awkwardness. Charlie's most cringe-inducing, awkward moments are prompted by his poor attempts at managing his feelings about what Emma had confessed. Most viewers at some point would reflexively want to say to the guy, "Jesus, get over it."
Since the movie has no sympathetic moments for the victims of mass shootings, and makes those who condemn mass shooters come off as obnoxious or annoying, the apparent strategy of the film is to make us sympathise with mass shooters.
Emma's discomfort is always portrayed as more deserving of sympathy than Charlie's. In addition to framing the urge to commit a massacre as a woman's problem, Borgli also racially codes the problem by making the black characters, Emma and Mike, invariably more level-headed than the white characters. Mike's "worst thing" was that he once hid behind his girlfriend when it seemed an angry dog was about to attack them. Throughout the rest of the film, he's shown trying to convince Rachel to cool down a little and guide Charlie into being less awkward.
Borgli is a Norwegian filmmaker and, for once, Pattinson uses his native accent, playing an English character. The outsider's perspective on American culture is deliberately invoked when Charlie presents the sympathetic montage and explicitly describes the cultural problem as "American". His "worst thing" was that he claimed to have cyberbullied someone in high school. From his tone, like so many of the things he says, it seems likely the story was a lie. If Charlie ever in his life did anything truly wrong, he has repressed it so far that he's not consciously aware of it.
It's certainly worth pondering the psychology of shooters in America. The reflexive media and law enforcement morality is to conceal personal details and opinions of shooters as much as possible and even aspects of their lives that would otherwise be portrayed as positive tend to be shown as evidence of their monstrousness, as though the people discussing have no faith in their own ability to assess the personalities of the shooters and so apply the same reproach to all details they can't suppress. This film is not really the long overdue exploration of that psychology, though. We know Emma was harassed and bullied by her classmates but we don't get any insight into why she chose violence as a solution. I was kind of reminded of Lars Von Triers' Dancer in the Dark, which was partly inspired by Von Triers' negative opinion of America's continued use of the death penalty but, having never visited the U.S. himself, his movie is more of a fairy tale than an insightful indictment. Von Trier knew what he was doing but I'm not sure Borgli did.
The Drama is available on Amazon Prime.
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